Covert One 4 - The Altman Code (45 page)

Who was he? Mcdermid continued, “There may be another problem with Feng.

An unfortunately large one.”

“What?”

“He may not be working only for us.”

“Explain.”

“Just as I paid him to work for Yu Yongfu so he could report on his
activities to me … I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s reporting on
our activities to someone else. Someone in Beijing perhaps. Whoever it
is must have either a lot of money or a lot of power. Otherwise, Feng
wouldn’t bother.”

The voice was grim, alarmed. “You had him checked.” It was a statement
not a question, and Randi realized one of her problems. This was the
man’s private voice, sarcastic, dry. What lingered in her mind was a
public voice, but she’d had contact with so many men in high government
posts that her memory was overloaded with them.

“Thoroughly,” Mcdermid said. “We know he isn’t Public Security or the
military. No, it’d be a private party.”

“One with an interest in the Empress?”

“That’s how I read it.”

“Very well. Do whatever you have to. 1 don’t want to know the details.

Just make sure the president doesn’t get the manifest.”

“You want the profit not the problems.”

“That’s our arrangement.”

Mcdermid’s words were sharp, a warning: “Your hands are as dirty as
mine. If I go down, you do, too.” The phone slammed into its cradle.

In the Buick, Randi sat back and closed her eyes, running the voice
through her mind. She attached faces to it. She tried it out in
different environments. After a half hour, she gave up. The answer would
come to
her at some unexpected moment, she told herself. She could only hope it
would be soon.

She dialed her cell. “Allan? You heard the new call?”

“Sure did,” Allan Savage said.

She told him about the familiarity of the voice. “Did anyone there
recognize him?”

“I’ve heard him before, too. But I can’t place him, and no one here can
either. But then, most of our guys are electronic geeks with atrophied
recall systems who don’t know who the DCI is and think the Gipper’s
still president.”

“Okay. I get the picture. See that the tape gets sent to Langley in the
next pouch. Have the lab boys check it against other voice prints.”

“You want me to make our report?”

“No. I’m coming in.” She would talk to the DCI directly.

Beijing The night enclosed Wei Gaofan’s office in Zhongnanhai in soft
darkness, with the lights of Beijing glowing above his walls, turning
the starry sky a shining pewter gray. He stood in his doorway, staring
out at his courtyard and the graceful willow tree and the groomed flower
beds that usually gave him a sense of tranquility. Still, tonight he was
heavy with distrust. He was called the ultimate hard-liner, as if it
were an insult, but his was the vision that was pure. The Owl and his
fellow liberals were politically blind. They were incapable of seeing
what he saw. He pitied them, but at the same time, they were his
ideological enemies. China’s enemies. They were forcing the country on
an unnatural path that would do more than expose it to the world. Their
way invited in the three contagions–capitalism, religion, and
individuality. When his phone rang, he returned inside to his desk. The
call had come in on his private line, known only to his network of
cronies, proteges, and spies. He had a premonition of bad news. “Yes?”

Feng Dun’s tones were corpselike, confirming the premonition: “Yu is
alive. It was the woman. She tricked me.” Wei inhaled sharply. “And the
Flying Dragon manifest?”

“Li and Yu still have it. Yu never burned it.”

He reported in detail. Wei fell heavily into his chair. His stomach
knotted, but he kept his voice steady. “Where are they?”

“Dazu. I’m on the road now. Heading there from Chongqing.”

“What are they doing?” Feng explained the call from Li Kuonyi to Ralph
Mcdermid and the deal they made. “I’ll have Yu, Li, and the manifest in
less than forty-eight hours.”

“You’re positive?”

“It’s hardly to our benefit for me to be unrealistic.” Feng’s voice had
returned to its normal, whispery timbre.

This turn of events had shaken him, but already he was showing renewed
confidence. In all the years Wei had employed Feng, he had never known
him to lack self-assurance. If anything, the former soldier of fortune
had an overabundance of it. But this was no small problem, and the
political complexity of it would be beyond the grasp of most security
experts. Feng had always been loyal to him, even when sent off to work
for others so he could bring back information. But then, Wei had taken
Feng with him as he had risen in government. Yu Yongfu would never have
been able to do for Feng what Wei could. Likewise, neither could an
American, even Ralph Mcdermid. For a former mercenary like Feng, it was
an honor to work so intimately for a member of the Standing Committee,
and the income was more than generous, especially when others paid him
as well.

When Wei became general secretary, Feng’s future would be secure, too.

They were locked together, two ambitious talents who each had need of
the other. “Do you want help in Dazu?” Wei asked. “Now isn’t the time to
go off like a solitary desert wolf.” Feng hesitated. “If you have a
trusted army commander in the area, his presence with a unit of troops
could prove useful, if by some accident we’re detained by the local
authorities.”

“I’ll arrange it. And Feng? Remember, Li Kuonyi is cunning. A dangerous
adversary.”

“There’s no need to insult me, master.”

Those were apparently harsh words from an underling, but Wei accepted
them with a smile of understanding as he hung up. Feng had definitely
returned to normal. Like the wolf, hunger drove him, and he was ravenous
for the two people who had made him look like an amateur. Now he was
even more determined to bring home the wayward manifest. Wei gazed out
his window at his garden again. The premonition of bad news persisted.

He had begun to suspect that Major Pan’s investigation into Colonel
Smith and the family of Li Aorong had turned up more about the Empress
than the major had written in his report to General Chu or that Niu
Jianxing had communicated to the general secretary or the Standing
Committee. At the same time, Wei was quietly lining up support on the
Politburo and the Central Committee. It was an unfortunate possibility
that he would have to eliminate Feng Dun and Ralph Mcdermid, as well as
Li Aorong and his daughter and son-in-law to cover all trace of
hard-line involvement in the Empress scheme. When Feng initially alerted
him to Mcdermid’s plan, it had seemed a stroke of good fortune. But now
he sensed danger. For a lifetime, he had survived and prospered by
acting quickly and ruthlessly on what he sensed.

At the top of a ladder set against a courtyard wall inside Zhongnanhai,
a maintenance mechanic completed his repair of one of the floodlights
that illuminated Wei Gaofan’s garden. As he worked, he muttered under
his breath at Wei Gaofan’s paranoia. Wei’s fear of assassination meant
he would allow no shadows in his garden.

His impatience with the eminent member of the Standing Committee was at
a higher level than usual, because he was not only a maintenance worker,
he was a spy. He had used the directional microphone hidden in his
toolbox to record the recent phone conversation inside Wei’s office and
was now anxious to deliver the tape to his superior in the
counterintelligence section of the Public Security Bureau. Besides, his
replacement had arrived and was already raking dirt near Wei’s office.

His listening device was in his toolbox, too, which was sitting on a
granite boulder, aimed at the office window.

The spy climbed down and carried his ladder and toolbox to a shed hidden
by dense shrubbery so as not to detract from the manicured park. Once
inside, he opened a compartment in the bottom of the toolbox and removed
the miniature audiotape.

He put everything away and dialed his cell phone. “I have a recording.”

He listened. “Ten minutes, yes. I’ll be there.”

He switched off the cell, locked the shed, and hurried through the lush
lakeside grounds to a guarded side door in the outer wall. It was used
only by service workers.

The guard, who passed him out every night at the end of his shift, still
insisted on seeing his ID. “You’re leaving late.”

“Command-performance repair for Master Wei. One of his damned lights
went out, and he nearly had a stroke. Couldn’t possibly wait for
morning.” It was only a partial lie. He himself had knocked out the
floodlight so he would have a reason to sit up there for a couple of
hours, recording conversations. There was a lot of political turmoil
right now, according to his handler, and every phone call to and from
Wei must be recorded. His job was to find excuses to be in a position to
make the recordings.

The guard rolled his eyes. Wei Gaofan’s demands were well known. The
guard stepped aside, and the worker walked into the street, turning away
from Tiananmen Square. He pushed through tourists still strolling around
the Forbidden City. Finally, he entered an old-fashioned tea shop, where
he paused in the doorway. There was his handler. He was reading a
newspaper at a table in the middle of the shop.

The maintenance man ordered a pot of low-grade Wu Yi and a packet of
English biscuits. With them in hand, he walked to a table toward the
rear. As he passed the man, he dropped his biscuits, bent, and picked
them up. He continued on and sat.

Major Pan Aitu was in a hurry. Still, he finished his tea first and
folded his newspaper before he left. The spycatcher walked two blocks to
his car.

Once in the car, he picked the tiny cassette from inside his shoe and
inserted it into a mini tape player. He listened to the entire
conversation, stopping at points to rewind and listen again.

Then he leaned back against the headrest, frowning. The meaning was
clear: Li Kuonyi and Yu Yongfu were not only alive, they had the invoice
manifest of the Empress’s cargo that Colonel Jon Smith had come to China
to find. The Shanghai couple were probably already on their way to Dazu,
preparing to sell the document to Feng Dun on behalf of Ralph Mcdermid.

But in truth, Feng would take back the document and kill the couple for
Wei Gaofan.

The implications of Feng’s report to Wei Gaofan were also clear.

Implications the Owl would be most interested to know. Wei Gaofan was
personally involved in the Empress and its cargo.

Events had progressed to the point that he must come to a decision as to
where his best interests lay. On one hand, Wei Gaofan already employed
Feng Dun, had clearly been involved in the Empress and its cargo from
the start, and would not likely welcome a counterintelligence agent such
as himself, who knew too much.

On the other hand, the Owl–Niu Jianxing–who was obviously opposed to
Wei Gaofan and his hard-line stance, knew nothing of these developments.

He would be most grateful.

Now Pan must go to Dazu, which was a considerable distance. When he got
there, he would have to make the decision. He had done well in the new
China, had no desire to return to the old, and all in all his best
interests might indeed lie with the Owl.

Aloft over Sichuan Province.

Jon sat against the bulkhead of a high-flying Navy E-2C Hawkeye AWACS
jet, his head resting back. It was nearly eleven p.m. The vibration of
the aircraft’s engines hummed into his ears. The plane was totally
blacked out, as it always was on a reconnaissance mission. But this was
no ordinary recon.

Edgy with nerves, he wore his usual black working clothes, with his
Beretta bolstered at the small of his back. A black insulated jumpsuit
lay ready beside him. Since he would leave the plane at thirty thousand
feet, he would need it. He had made hundreds of jumps, but never from
such a height, and the truth was … it had been a long time since his
last one. The navy personnel on the carrier had gone over the basics
with him and thrown in a couple of tips.

He had oxygen equipment because he would free-fall to ten thousand feet
before opening the chute. There was no war down there, at least not a
shooting one, and no one would be watching and waiting …
theoretically. The drop zone had been calculated carefully–created from
satellite photos that were less than twenty-four hours old. Cloud cover
was expected to be adequate. Winds were relatively mild.

Every technical precaution and preparation had been made. Now it was up
to him to ready himself psychologically. He went over each step in his
mind, looking for human error and unforeseen problems. He shook out his
arms and legs periodically to keep his muscles loose.

A crewman came back. “Time, Colonel. Suit up.”

“How long?” “Ten minutes. Skipper said to tell you everything looks on
the button.

Moon won’t be up for a couple of hours, weather’s holding, and no one’s
locked onto us. All’s quiet, as they say. I’ll be back to test your
equipment and give you the heads up. Remember, when you jump, make sure
you don’t fall upward. That wild-and-crazy tail assembly of ours can
chop you like salad greens.”

The crewman went away, chuckling at his own bad joke. Jon did not laugh.

He hooked his Heckler & Koch MP5K to three rings on the special harness
that crossed his chest to hold it in place. He dabbed blacking onto his
face, avoiding his wounds. He struggled into the insulated oversuit and
gloves and zipped the suit closed. After buckling on the outer harness,
he hooked on his two parachutes and attached his oxygen, altimeter, GPS
unit, and other equipment.

Getting hot, he felt as if he weighed a half ton. He wondered briefly
how troops dressed for full combat could even move and answered his own
unspoken question: Because they had to. He remembered. He had been there
himself.